Looking through the crystal ball at how the movie and music companies (and perhaps to a larger extent the IT and hardware companies) would like the market to evolve we may have few Christmas’s left where people can actually give real physical movies and music. Giving music has been a long tradition since the first days of vinyl and with the advent some thirty years ago of video tape movies have also been a main stay of recent festive gift giving. However with these industries pushing to move to digital downloads where we do not actually own anything but just licence everything what are we all to do? Doo all give each other iTunes or Netflix vouchers? The reason I still buy CD’s and Blu-ray is that I want to own what I spend my money on and I want to be able to consume it whenever I want to. I don’t want to wait for it to download and I don’t want to have watched it several times only to be told that my licence for it has expired and I have to pay more to enjoy it again. A lot of people within the industry say that the time for physical media is nigh. Well I for one intend to keep growing my collection of hundreds of CD’s and movies and perhaps this is a movement we can grow. Blu-ray can keep the fight alive by providing far better audio and video than any download service but I fear music may be lost. We (the 40 something’s – ouch that hurt to type) could be the last generation that appreciated good sound quality, looking at my own children they prefer convenience over sound quality and with the growth of downloads I fear that will only get worse.
Give the gift of high quality audio and video this Christmas, while you can…
